I found this podcast from this 
post:
I subbed today for a 7th and 8th grade teacher. I’m not exaggerating when I say at least 50% of the students were at a 2nd grade reading level. The students were to spend the class time filling out an “all about me” worksheet, what’s your name, favorite color, favorite food etc. I was asked 20 times today “what is this word?”. Movie. Excited. Trait. “How do I spell race car driver?”
I’ve only listened to one episode so far, but it’s really well produced, seems well-researched and very well put together.
From what I gather so far, the ways that the American public school system “teaches” kids how to read is not only completely wrong, but actually saddles them bad habits which fundamentally hinder their reading comprehension.
A huge swath of American adults are functionally illiterate, and I think I’m starting to understand why.
This is really fascinating stuff. It explains a lot of things I’ve noticed about other people in my life I’ve known who are poor readers. I’ve always been a great reader for as long as I can remember, had parents who helped teach me to read and read with me and all that which can help a lot. The “incorrect” way that school are teaching to kids is to basically guess what words means instead of trying to memorize the phonetic pronunciation of individual words to commit them to memory. I remember in high school there being activities where we would go around the room and different students would read different parts of like a book or textbook out loud. And as someone lucky enough to have learned how to read well, I was always flabbergasted when I would hear some people read. I’d be reading along in the book and thinking “what the fuck, they’re saying words that aren’t even on this page. How is this even possible to mess up this badly that you’re not just mispronouncing words you’re literally inserting words out of nowhere” and the research would suggest that’s its because they were literally just reading the first part of the word and guessing the rest of it. Zero, like, base line understanding of what letter combinations make what sounds. No wonder some people hate reading it’s basically playing a guessing game 😳
A lot of people are commenting about how, so what, lots of people can read and are also stupid. Except this isn’t about being stupid. Or dumb. Reading and writing is a skill you gotta be tutored into. You won’t learn it through intuition. You won’t learn it through osmosis, guesswork or because the Holy Ghost descended from the heavens to enlighten your soul. You have to be taught, step by step, how to decode writing in order to then develop it into other skills, like different levels of reading, making annotations, making summaries, prose writing, and so on. All of these things should ideally become second nature to you through a long process of ‘scholarization’, one that is formulated with full understanding of what kids of different ages tend to need, and what kids in particular may require of their teachers.
Think about it. This isn’t like zoomers being unable to use Windows because they have phones. It’s like not having a school system in the first place. Good god, the districts that keep this scam pedagogy in place are gonna create a lost generation.
Literacy is a communist conspiracy
MILLENNIA of funny SQUIGGLES on stone tablets, papyrus, and PAPER
There are only THREE sounds in the word “EIGHT”, why are there FIVE letters???
They have played us for FOOLS
Thanks for the recommendation–will definitely be checking this out.
edit: I just listened to the first episode and WTF, the people responsible for getting this new curriculum into schools should be in prison. It’s a crime of unfathomable proportions against children who have no way to defend themselves.
The “reading recovery/whole language” people are literally a cult. There are so many quotes that boil down to, “Teaching phonics and having kids actually figure out words just felt so traditional. Reading recovery was so refreshing and Lucy Calkins is my hero!”
There was an audio clip of a worm-brained lib going to a Lucy seminar and she could not stop gushing. “I get to see Lucy! This is the best day of my life!” and so on. These fuckers get the wall. This shit is still happening because of all the acolytes that refuse to accept the dogma of actually fucking reading to learn how to read. The Soviets, Cubans, and Chinese figured this out decades ago. America is going to become a client state of China in our lifetimes because no one knows how to do anything.
America is going to become a client state of China in our lifetimes because no one knows how to do anything.
Anecdotal story, and I mean no offence to Americans. I was once day-drinking on the rooftop of an airport hotel with a mate, and struck up a conversation with a chubby Danish fellow. He said he was a business owner. He noted that neither of us were Americans so he felt comfortable talking a bit of shit.
He said his company does business with quite a few European countries, but also Americans. He said he hates dealing with Americans because every single time he had a question for them they always had to put him on hold and ask their supervisor because nobody ever seemed to know how to make a decision.
“WHY? WHY do you have to ask your supervisor? This is a simple yes or no question!”
And then he sighed and said “I honestly have no idea how these people made it to the moon and back”.
There is a deep fear of responsibility and being wrong that is beaten into Americans from childhood. No one wants to be the one at fault, so they always defer to authority. It makes them into very compliant workers who also need constant supervision. People are so poorly educated they are often incapable of doing anything without direct instruction, including answering simple questions. It’s real fucked up here and this podcast made me shake with rage at how much more fucked up it is for kids now. I’m just thankful my mom took an active role in my education and taught me phonics, reading, and basic math before kindergarten.
America is going to become a client state of China
I’m all aboard as long as we get some belt and road over here.
Wait, what would the alternative to phonics be?
Either read through some of the linked thread or listen to the first episode of the podcast. It’s so dumb it’s unbelievable. There’s a “system” that is literally “just guess lol”.
Yeah I’m seeing it now, but I just couldn’t believe it - Thought I must’ve misunderstood something. They just make kids memorize whole words instead of learning how letters funtion? It’s wild. The us is apparently just full of illiterate youths now?
It does explain quite a few encounters I’ve had on here and twitter, where users misunderstood basic stuff. A lot of people just reiterating what I write as if it was an argument against me and the like. Seems like reading comprehension is non-existent.no no, it’s even worse. read the whole word is an older idea. they’re teaching kids to guess the word without even looking at it. they’re taught to check if they have the word right by looking at the first couple of letters. like they’re teaching kids by literally covering up the word and only showing it after they guess.
That reddit thread is full of people (hopefully not teachers) insisting that it’s actually a parent’s job to teach their children to read. Ignoring the ‘fuck poor or undereducated parents’ attitude on display, I have to ask, what’s the point of early education then? My first few years of school were all about literacy and numeracy skills. If these aren’t the responsibility of the education system at that age, then what on earth is? I guess it’s just daycare to these people…
People have just accepted that American public education is a failure and the parents have to do the real teaching. And yet so many parents don’t even know there’s anything wrong until way too late. Even if the schools are passing kids despite not being able to read, an engaged parent should be able to notice it very early on as long they read with their kid at home. My mom read to me nearly every night until I could read on my own. She would read a page and then have me read a page after a while. Eventually, I was reading whole books to her and I loved reading so much that when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away, leaving me with a TV that sat unused, while I bawled my eyes out.
when I got in trouble one time she took my bookcase away,
Giga Chad mom casually lifting up an entire book case and moving it out of your room.
No she just glared angrily at the bookcase until it left of its own accord
Even if the schools are passing kids despite not being able to read
And schools should always pass kids. The body of literature, theory and experiments in that regard for teaching education in Europe is quite extensive. If your society is structured around passing grades then the way to built up on the ability of students isn’t to force them for years in the same rooms, but to change what they experience, keep up the social links and give specific support.
Besides that even if a school isn’t able to give specific support it is better for kids to not be put in repeating classes.
What you write is true though, having cultural attitudes at home that do sometimes center books are great. They ought to be somewhat supplemented even for kids that are praised as being smart with other things, that are beneficial for social and physical aspects. If your kid likes a certain series, try to enable the kid to visit a fan conference about it or alike.
Just like in Le Guin’s Earth Sea, one of the most important lessons for the young magician’s apprentice wasn’t to control magic. It was to chill under trees and find calm as well as connection in nature.
People think school should prepare you for your future job in an amazon warehouse
We’re gonna start seeing Playskool babies’ first parcel scanner toys soon.
That exists and kids love scanning things with something that goes BEEP really loud
I was thinking about this in the context of the UK the other day, and it makes sense to wear down the educational system as much as possible, mainly for two reasons.
Quality isn’t necessary. The education system up to 14-ish years old serves essentially as free(ish) daycare so parents don’t have an excuse not to work. This then allows rent/house prices to inflate up to what a couple can pay, rather than a single parent.
The uneducated masses are easy to control. I work/live in a very well-educated environment, but have regular contact with less educated people. It’s insane the things they’ll believe in.
I think education-as-daycare became really apparent during the first year of the pandemic. Businesses and the gov were really pushing for kids to go back to school so they could send their parents back to work.
I think adult illiteracy is pretty high in the U.S. as well. I have had multiple middle managers who cannot write a coherent paragraph to save their lives, to the degree that I have had to go literally ask them what they mean because otherwise it would be reading tea leaves.
Even worse is people who are lifer manual laborers, they can be very smart and great with their hands, but ask them to read something above very basic text and their eyes just glaze over. Something has gone seriously wrong here.
79% of American adults are literate. When I learned that recently I thought that had to be some kind of mistake. It can’t be that fucking low, right? But it is.
Insert Parenti Cuban literacy quote here
this one?
You can look at any existing socialist country— if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist— whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance. When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?” I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read. So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.
—Michael Parenti
lmao dam these days I can’t read Parenti without tearing up
That part about his father is straight up my grandmother, she can’t read, not even her native language, because the French colonialists never taught her
Fuck any liberal who stands in the way of global revolution
Always gets me teary eyed
saved this as an image for ez redeployment
leftist meme
Highlighted in Yellow for historical accuracy.
(Not so) fun fact: The FBI specifically made ‘creative writing’ workshops back in the 1950s and 60s to kneecap media literacy and implant anti-communist propaganda into graduate programs so that those who went on to teaching would instill that same ideology into their students.
Aw yeah, the only reason we would ever fund the arts is either for para-military parades or anti-communusm.
“…at all. The more one read, the more one was subject to indoctrination, which is something which of course I experienced myself. This is the reason why achieving “literacy” is always the first aim of communist regimes. Elementary.”
I remember there was a opinion piece saying that Education in the Eastern Bloc and China is a tool for the government to control people.
I guess not able to read is a way to not turn red
it’s even more nonsensical than that. governments have been trying and failing to stamp this out for 20 years. the people behind it built a cult following in elementary education circles and rebranded their curriculum so they could keep peddling their nonsense, changing the description to avoid falling afoul of the law but without changing the content. it’s literally that the publishing company had a much larger marketing budget than any of the researchers saying “no, stop”. so until public media started running the story, there was no meaningful education for teachers telling them " this theory of reading education is wrong".
it’s capitalism eating itself.
You’ll think that people look at public services like education as a product are stupid but we all know deep inside that the commodification of education has the end goal of making more divisive with premium private education for the elite and the bare minimal for the ‘‘public’’ education (which can be run by religious institution just like the good olde days).
Ultimately this is just a way to stratify society with more defined castes
That rhetoric perfectly tracks with the charter school push to turn education into job training programs for K-8 students
History will be provided by a for-profit coloration, so no need to worry about that bit. If you go into school knowing how to read, then great. We’ll group you in with the kids who will be of use to any of the Fortune 500 companies. Otherwise, we’ll group you with the “other” low-skilled kids. The only critical thinking skills that will be used will be the ones that teach you how to solve business problems
Charter schools are stupid because it’s never about education. We all know what they do with ‘‘problematic’’ students.
This is just a last filter before dumping the leftover into military school in this shitty Folgers coffee called the privatized education system
When our kids were 7th and 8th grade my wife subbed at the school for a while. She worked a number of days at their grade level and a grade or 2 higher.
What she saw was very similar.
Our kids were getting straight As. No exaggeration. Yet they were having trouble doing homework consisting of math problems they struggled with 2 years prior.
They weren’t being taught anything, they were being prepped for the standardized tests given at the end of the year. Also, any tests and quizzes throughout the year they were given multiple tries to retake, and that explains the straight As.
That’s when we pulled them out and began homeschooling. No regerts.
We’ve been homeschooling since the pandemic started but my kids said they want to go back to school this year, so we’re letting them go back. I’ve told them that I’ll be with them, though, if they change their minds. I have years of experience as a teacher overseas and I’ve also subbed in local school districts. I didn’t encounter issues with reading pre-pandemic but I’m pretty sure now that after three years of doing commie homeschool, my kids are the ones who should be teaching social studies rather than learning from the white liberals whose only job is to obscure the past and confuse the young. We also tutored the fuck out of our older kid who was having issues with math. Thanks to doing that with khan academy, he no longer has those issues, and both of our kids are now interested in coding (which isn’t offered for kids their age at their school).
I always read better than other kids from my background because I read in my free time and had parents who were willing to read to me. The education system did indeed hinder rather than help. And this was decades ago.
“What are you reading to the kids?”
“Oh. A ghost story.”
“Cool, carry on.”
“A specter is looming over Europe…”
that explains all these dumbass libs
The educated literate Americans are worse lol
They’re more likely to support wars on the side of America and other weird shit
“Literacy was always the most basic tool of capitalist propaganda. If you are not literate, you cannot be fed capitalist propaganda” - Michael Parenti
The educated literate Americans are worse lol
They’re more likely to support wars on the side of America and other weird shit
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_07_27.htm
“The revolution that teaches children to read [so they can spell Slobonmi Krainee] has my support.”
Bill “The Good Billionaire” Gates saw to that about 20 years ago and it started with an amazing piece of neoliberal propaganda called “Waiting For Superman.” His buddy in the “reform” movement was
, by the way, and even arranged to have special uncredentialed classes full of “students” to victimize in his spare time.The real shit is when you realize that Bill Gates (and most other western “philanthropy” in Africa) is basically just privatizing public services while simultaneously exerting a extreme degree of personal control over the educational curriculum of almost an entire continent.
He isn’t being nice, he’s building a pool of human resources, for anything he wants.
And they will call him a saint for it.
Americans don’t leave the record player on at night
what does that mean?
It’s the Biden explanation for why poor kids aren’t as smart as white kids™. According to Biden you need to leave the record player on at night to help develop your childrens’ vocabulary.
I had to google this because I missed it somehow and didn’t fucking believe it but holy shit, time really did stop in the 1970s for some of these fucking people. When some of them get dementia and you ask them what year it is, they’ll tell you in total seriousness and full confidence that it’s 1978, and get angry if you tell them otherwise. Biden can (probably) say what year it is correctly, but on the inside for him it’s still nineteen fucking seventy eight.
Come to think of it, the Victorian Age never ended, we are still trapped in the nineteenth century (the imperial stage of capitalism), we just have phones and airplanes and the internet so we think otherwise, but people at that time also thought “wow technology we’re so advanced!” even though it was the year 1878.
Where is Biden finding these radio DJ grade auto-flipping and auto-advancing record players.
33s have like a 25 minute run time max per side.
